What day is the Sabbath and should we rest in that day?

The Sabbath is the seventh day of the week which is Saturday. God instituted the Sabbath at Creation- He blessed and sanctified the seventh day. This is the only supporting reason for our weekly time cycle “And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made” (Genesis 2:2-3). Some say that the seventh day Sabbath is for the Jews only but the Sabbath was made and given to man about 2500 years before the existence of the Jews.

God reinforced His Ten Commandments– in stone, with His own finger. He placed special emphasis on remembering His seventh-day Sabbath saying, “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it” (Exodus 20:8-11) – the fourth Commandment.

God made the Sabbath a holy day of rest. As for the other six days, God commanded not to rest on those days but to work. The seventh day is different from all the other six days, because it has God’s blessing.

God blessed the seventh day because He had created the world in six days. It was the birthday of the world. The memorial can not be changed because it points backward to an accomplished fact. Likewise, a person’s birthday cannot be changed because it is a memorial of his birth which happened on a set day.

Some claim that Jesus changed the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first but Jesus stated: “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matthew 5:17-18). The change of the Sabbath was made by men.

And when Jesus prophesied about events that would take place forty years after His death (A.D. 70, the destruction of Jerusalem), He underscored the fact that His followers would still be observing His sacred weekly Sabbath day “But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day” (Matthew 24:20).

Also, Christ’s disciples kept the Sabbath after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection: “And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments; and rested the sabbath day according to the commandment”; “But when they departed from Perga, they came to Antioch in Pisidia, and went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and sat down”; “And when the Jews were gone out of the synagogue, the Gentiles besought that these words might be preached to them the next sabbath. …And the next sabbath day came almost the whole city together to hear the word of God”; “And on the sabbath we went out of the city by a river side, where prayer was wont to be made; and we sat down, and spake unto the women which resorted thither”; “Then Paul, as his custom was, went in to them, and for three Sabbaths reasoned with them from the Scriptures”; “And he reasoned in the synagogue every sabbath, and persuaded the Jews and the Greeks” (Luke 23:56; Acts 13:14, 42-44; 16:13; 17:2; 18:4).

There’s no mention in the New Testament (written up to sixty years after Christ’s death) of changing or eliminating the seventh-day Sabbath.

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